Why This ‘Ridiculous’ British Farm Truck Helped Destroy An Entire Italian Army In The Desert D
1940, a garage in Cairo owned by the Thomas Cook Travel Company. British engineers are doing something that would make any Rolls-Royce enthusiast physically ill. They are unbolting the armored body of a World War I Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, one of the finest fighting vehicles ever built, and lowering it onto the bare chassis of a Fordson farm truck fresh off a cargo ship from Dagenham.
The result looks wrong. The proportions are off. The rear wheels sit too far back. The bonnet is too long. It looks like two different vehicles welded together by someone working from memory, because that is exactly what it is. And within months, these Frankenstein machines will screen the destruction of an entire Italian army, race a thousand miles across open desert to lift a siege in Iraq, and fight their way into Syria.
24 were built. Not one survives. This is their story. To understand why British engineers committed this act of mechanical blasphemy, you need to understand the crisis they faced. By the summer of 1940, Britain’s armored car fleet in the Middle East was ancient. The Rolls-Royce armored cars, first designed in 1914 by the Royal Naval Air Service, had been the finest fighting vehicles of World War I. T. E.
Lawrence called them more valuable than rubies. The 1920 pattern, commissioned after the war with thicker radiator armor and solid wheels, served across the British Empire for two decades. Approximately 100 were built before Rolls-Royce ceased chassis production entirely, but by 1940, the youngest of these cars was over 15 years old.
Their Silver Ghost chassis had never been designed to carry over 4 tons of armor plate across hundreds of miles of scorching Egyptian desert. According to regimental accounts from the 11th Hussars, crews in summer heat often had to use their own drinking water to cool the overheating engine. The chassis were, in the blunt assessment of military historians, simply tired, mechanically exhausted after decades of hard colonial service.
Mobility in soft sand was poor, with the vehicles weighing 6 tons fully loaded. Breakdowns were constant. Spare parts did not exist. When Italy declared war on June the 10th, 1940, 76 Rolls-Royce armored cars remained in service worldwide. Modern replacements were desperately needed elsewhere.
No new Rolls-Royce chassis could be manufactured. The armored bodies and turrets, however, were still perfectly functional. 8 to 10 mm of riveted steel plate, a rotating turret mounting a Vickers water-cooled machine gun, 20 years old and still effective against infantry, soft-skinned vehicles, and aircraft on the ground.
The solution was brutal pragmatism. Strip the armor from the dying Rolls-Royce chassis and mount it onto something that actually worked. That something was the Ford 018T, a 1 and 1/2 ton truck manufactured in the United States and assembled at Ford’s Dagenham plant in England under the Fordson trade name.
The name Fordson originally referred to Ford farm tractors, but in Britain it became the brand for Dagenham built commercial vehicles. The chassis were shipped to England in completely knocked-down form, militarized and modified, then sent to Egypt. New radiator and engine compartment armor was designed and manufactured in England before the whole assembly crossed the Mediterranean to Cairo.
According to David Fletcher, the former historian at the Bovington Tank Museum and the foremost authority on this vehicle, 20 Rolls-Royce armored cars had their bodies fitted to Fordson chassis in 1940. Four additional vehicles were built as reserves, 24 total. The engine was a Ford flathead V8 displacing 3.
6 L producing 85 horsepower at 3800 revolutions per minute, mated to a three-speed manual gearbox. This was comparable to the original Rolls-Royce 40/50 horsepower six-cylinder, which produced roughly 80 horsepower. But the Fordson’s critical advantage was the chassis itself. A 6×4 configuration, meaning six wheels with four driven, gave it twin rear axles spreading the weight across soft ground.
The wheelbase measured 158 in, 12 in longer than the original Rolls-Royce. One detail that still puzzles researchers is the steering. The Ford 018T was left-hand drive. The original Rolls-Royce was right-hand drive. No wartime account mentions this change. Crews apparently just adapted without comment. Visually, the Fordson was immediately distinguishable.
It sat longer at the rear with smaller wheels featuring five triangular holes instead of the Rolls-Royce’s disc wheels. An armored box bolted to the back of the superstructure earned the universal nickname the coffin. It housed the radio equipment. Four different radiator door configurations were documented in photographs, ranging from completely open to an elaborate double plate arrangement with offset ventilation slots for ballistic protection.
The weapons fit reflected wartime improvisation at its most creative. Every vehicle carried the turret-mounted .303 Vickers water-cooled machine gun as its primary weapon. Most received a .55 Boys anti-tank rifle in a distinctive square armored box mounting beside the Vickers, a vital upgrade since the original Rolls-Royce had zero anti-armor capability.
At least one vehicle carried a .30 Browning salvaged from an aircraft instead. Anti-aircraft guns mounted on scarf rings scavenged from obsolete biplanes varied wildly between cars. Photographic analysis of a parade showing 11 vehicles revealed a roughly equal split between single Browning .
303s and Lewis guns, with only one car mounting twin Brownings. One experimental vehicle had its turret removed entirely and replaced with a one-pounder automatic cannon on an open mounting. These 24 hybrid machines entered combat in September 1940, when two sections of number two armored car company RAF were attached to the 11th Hussars as D Squadron.
The 11th Hussars were the famous cherry pickers, the premier armored car regiment in the British Army, and part of the 7th Armored Division. The RAF cars joined the regiment’s own 34 Rolls-Royce 1924 pattern cars and 30 Morris CS9 armored cars patrolling the Egyptian-Libyan frontier. Now, before we get into the combat record, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British desert engineering, hit subscribe.
It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right. Let us get into what happened when these Frankenstein machines met the enemy. When Marshal Graziani’s Italian 10th Army invaded Egypt on September the 13th, 1940, the 11th Hussars formed the covering force that harassed the advance.
D Squadron’s Fordsons were part of the screen that helped inflict 3500 casualties on the Italians before they dug in at Sidi Barrani, 60 miles inside Egypt. The armored cars then joined aggressive raiding formations called Jock Columns that kept the enemy off balance for 3 months. During Operation Compass in December 1940, the great British counterattack, the Fordsons joined the advance that shattered the Italian position, capturing over 38,000 prisoners.
The RAF cars then screened the famous dash across the desert bulge of Cyrenaica to cut off the retreating Italian army. This culminated in the Battle of Beda Fomm in February 1941, where the Italian 10th Army was trapped and forced to surrender en masse. D Squadron pushed as far west as El Agheila before being recalled after five continuous months of front-line operations.
The most dramatic chapter came 3 months later. In May 1941, pro-Axis Iraqi forces besieged RAF Habbaniya, a critical British airbase west of Baghdad. Number two armored car company received urgent orders to proceed to Iraq as part of Habforce. Eight Fordson armored cars covered approximately 1,000 miles in 4 days across open desert, racing ahead of the main column.
Half the company, under Squadron Leader Michael Cassano, pushed forward to assist the Arab Legion in capturing Rutbah Fort, held by approximately 100 Iraqi desert police. When RAF bombing failed to dislodge the garrison, Cassano’s armored cars fought a day-long engagement against Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s force of 40 armed trucks.
The enemy withdrew under cover of darkness. When the Iraqi garrison subsequently fled, two Fordson armored cars under Cassano were the first King Col’s forces to enter the fort. Cassano received the Military Cross. The company advanced to Baghdad itself, where a famous Imperial War Museum photograph shows a Fordson waiting outside the city during armistice negotiations with the rebel government.
The battle-hardened company immediately deployed again for the campaign in Syria against Vichy French forces that summer, fighting across a third theater in under a year. Against the Italian armored cars it faced in the desert, the Fordson occupied an interesting position. The Lancia 1ZM, Italy’s equivalent World War I era colonial armored car, was a 1917 design with three 6.
5 mm machine guns, weighing 4.2 tons, capable of 37 mph. The two types were effectively peers in obsolescence. But the Autoblinda AB41, which entered Italian service in 1941, was a different matter entirely. It carried 15 mm of armor, nearly double the Fordson’s 8 to 10 mm. Its 20 mm Breda autocannon could destroy the Fordson at ranges where the Vickers machine gun was useless.
The AB41 had four-wheel drive, dual driving positions, and a top speed exceeding 45 mph. It was considered one of the finest armored cars of the war. That British forces sent World War I vintage armor against such machines tells you everything about the desperation of 1940. Among British vehicles, the closest comparison was the Morris CS9, another improvised design serving alongside the Fordsons with the 11th Hussars. The Morris was lighter at 4.
5 tons with thinner 7 mm armor, but reportedly handled soft sand better. The South African-built Marmon-Herrington armored cars represented a similar philosophy of pressing Ford truck components into armored car service, but on a vastly larger industrial scale. 5,746 Marmon-Herringtons were built versus 24 Fordsons, and the South African vehicles had the critical advantage of four-wheel drive.
The Fordsons served until February 1943, when they were replaced by Autolite reconnaissance cars for the final Tunisian campaign. Photographic evidence from Cap Bon in 1943 confirms at least one vehicle still carried a Boys anti-tank rifle at that late date. Three years of continuous frontline duty for improvised machines built from components spanning three decades.
The Fordson armored car exist within a peculiar institutional story that most military historians overlook. These were not army vehicles. They belonged to the Royal Air Force. At the 1921 Cairo Conference, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill and Chief of Air Staff Lord Trenchard agreed that the RAF would police Iraq and Palestine using a doctrine called air control, where aircraft supported by armored cars and locally recruited troops maintained order across vast territories at minimal cost. RAF armored car companies were formed near Cairo from the winter of 1921, eventually numbering six companies spread across the Middle East. Number two company, formed on April the 7th, 1922, had been operating in the region for 18 years before the war even started. According to Dr. Nigel Warwick, the RAF Regiment’s official historian, these units accumulated unmatched experience in desert warfare that proved invaluable when the shooting started. No Fordson armored cars survive today. Not
one of the 24 vehicles exist in any museum anywhere in the world. A handful of Imperial War Museum photographs and a few pages in specialist books are virtually all that remains. One enthusiast, Bill Hodgson of the Yorkshire Military Vehicle Trust, built a loose road legal replica on a commercial truck chassis over approximately three years.
It may be the closest anyone will ever come to seeing a Fordson armored car in the metal. Think back to that Cairo garage in 1940. Engineers from a travel company’s workshop bolting World War I Rolls-Royce armor onto American farm truck chassis, building fighting vehicles for the Royal Air Force that would be crewed by airmen and fighters cavalry alongside one of the most famous regiments in the British Army.
It sounds like fiction. It was not. 24 vehicles, three theaters, three years, the destruction of an Italian army, the relief of a besieged airbase, and a fighting advance across North Africa into Tunisia. British engineering was not always elegant. Sometimes it was a Frankenstein monster bolted together in a borrowed garage with whatever was available.
